I own nothing, not the characters, the space where this story exists, or even the eyes that you are using to read it. This is for entertainment purposes only, no money involved.
Leiutenant Riza Hawkeye stared at Danny in shock as the boy pushed himself up off the ground from where he had been pushed too after that strange attack. The skin had been burned from his hands, and they were dripping blood onto the ground, sparks of bright green light jumping between the exposed muscles as they moved and strange glowing green veins were easy to see through the blood.
"What on Earth?" She wondered.
"Hawkeye, look out!" Ed shouted, pulling the woman out of her trance so that she turned just in time to see Scar running at her with his killer arm outstretched.
She ducked down to dodge the swing, moving her pistol in front of her in order to cap him in the caff. She had missed the bone but the man's leg gave in anyways.
Scar gave a grunt of pain as he leaned forward over the lieutenant, trying to make it so that he fell with his alchemic arm on top of her. But the lieutenant quickly rolled to the side so the hand instead hit the street, sending up a cloud of dust.
Pushing herself to one knee, she held her gun pointed towards the space were she knew the mad man to be. "Try anything else and you are a dead man." She said calmly. She could hear the sounds of cars coming to a halt outside of the alley as reinforcements showed up. After they would have been useful, and before it would stop being harmful. Typical.
"Lieutenant Hawkeye!" Roy shouted as he entered the alley, a row of gunmen behind him. Riza wanted to shout to get the people out of there before they saw what Alphonse Elric was really like underneath that armor, but it was too late for that now.
The smoke cleared and they could all see. Scar looked up at them with his angry red eyes. "Ishvalan." The word was parroted around as they all saw him for what he was.
"Scar, in the name of the Fuhrer we are taking you in." Mustang said pulling on his alchemy gloves.
Scar didn't say a word. But his arm glowed and the ground underneath his hand exploded, caving in and blasting dust through the alleyway, leaving everyone coughing. By the time the dust cleared for a second time, he was gone, a large hole into the sewers.
"Damn it. Gets some man down there to search for him, I don't want this man escaping!" Mustang said angrily.
"Al!" Ed shouted pulling himself up and limping over to his brother's metal body. Everyone staring in slack jawed disbelief. "Al you alright? You still in there?"
Ed was answered by a punch to the face. The two of them started to shout about what they were supposed to have done in a situation like that. Things just getting more and more out of hand.
"Ms. Hawkeye, are you alright?" Hawkeye turned her head to see Danny standing next to her.
The blond woman looked down at the boy's torn hands. "I should be the one asking you that." She said, wondering how Danny could even more. His skin had been ripped from his flesh. That should have been painful beyond words.
Danny blinked before noticing that she was looking at his hands. He raised them up and looked surprised at their condition, as if he couldn't even feel it. "I'll be fine." He said, clapping the hands together. Sparks of green electricity running along the lower arms as skin cells started to rapidly multiply to make up for what had been lost. Danny gritted his teeth slightly as the sparks moved along his arms, as if that was more painful that the skin being pulled off of it.
"I'm in an extra special freak show story today." Lieutenant Colonel Hughes said as he and Major Armstrong watched the scene unfolding before them.
Roy walked up to the two, they had all been thick as thieves ever since the rebellion, so he had their full trust. "I know you two have your questions, but this isn't the place. We need to get these kids off the street." He said to them, giving them one of his looks.
"Sure thing. We'll get the cars ready." Hughes said with a nod.
Mustang turned his eyes to Riza and then to the Elric brothers. "I should never have suggested they leave Resembool." He said, guilt in his voice, knowing that the two had almost died because Edward's state license.
"Roy, what's done is done. We need to keep moving." Riza whispered to him, earning a nod. That was all humans ever did. They kept moving, at least... until they were dead.
None of them saw the two figures standing on the roofs nearby watching the seen. "Well lucky us, it doesn't look like we had to show ourselves after all, does it Gluttony." A woman said patting what looked like an extremely fat man on his bald head. "And there is a second sacrifice as well. Father will be most pleased."
Danny and the Elric brothers were all moved back to the old Tucker house where they all sat around the table to get confessions out of the way. Danny haven't already used his Alchemy to fix up Ed's scraps and bruises, so a hospital wouldn't be needed. Only a mechanic for his arm.
Ed and Al had been forced to go first. Telling the story of how they had tried to bring back their mother and what had gone wrong. It had cleared things up for Danny who had assumed that Ed had tried to bring Al back. It made more sense this way. He didn't manage to bring back his brother's soul back from the dead, because his brother never truly died.
"What I want to know, is what you did back there? You preformed Alchemy without a circle, just like Ed does." Alphonse said, looking to Danny. He had lost an arm and a leg during the attack, and the hole in the armor was now being covered by a bed sheet that had been tied in place.
"I don't know if that was even Alchemy. Wasn't like anything I'd seen before." Ed added.
Danny shifted in his chair a bit. He was not looking forward to having to tell his story. "I'm not exactly sure what I did back there. Though as far as using Alchemy without a circle goes... there is a story there." Danny said with a sigh. "My little sister was born sick. She was also too ill to even get out of bed, and the medicine my parents invented to save her life didn't fit the problem. Her organs were getting weaker and weaker as the tissue was dying."
"But she seems fine to me." Ed said thinking back to the little girl playing around with Sam.
"That's because I came up with an idea." Danny lied, not wanting to reveal how much of his parents research he had. "I was going to use a eastern form of alchemy, called Alkahestry, in order to force the dead and dying tissue to act like healthy tissue. Reversing the effects of her sickness. And it worked, though at a price. Apparently, I had gotten too close to Human Transmutation, and I was punished for stepping into god's domain, just like the Elric brothers were."
"You've seen Truth." Edward said in surprise. Danny could only nod.
"What are you talking about? What truth?" Hawkeye asked them.
"You don't want to know." The two boys said together with drained looks.
"Truth takes a price from you if you attempt Human Transmutation. What was yours?" Ed asked Danny.
Danny swallowed, not sure if they would believe him without a demonstration. He lifted up his hand and grabbed a knife that was on the table. Then, before they could stop him, he drove it into his own chest where his heart should have been. Looking up at their shocked faces, he pulled out the knife before using some more Alkahestry in order to close the wound. "My price, it was my heart."
"That's impossible... isn't it?" Hughes asked, looking around the table.
"Should be." Mustang said, though he wasn't that sure after that little show. "If you lost your heart, then how are you alive?"
"The same alchemy that fixed my sister is burned onto every cell in my body. I suppose you could say it is part of my DNA at this point. Every moment all of the reactions that are needed to sustain my life accrue, even though I don't have a beating heart to supply the needed oxygen to get the energy for the reactions. Instead its using alchemic energies to keep me going." Danny said, flexing his fingers. Thinking about each and every reaction in each and every muscle. He could see all the lights flickering just underneath his skin. "But alchemy being done on the body at the cellular level is painful beyond what I can even begin to describe. I had never felt anything like it before in my life, and without medication to dull the pain, I can't even stand. Even with it dulled I'm in pretty much constant pain all the time."
"So that medicine you care around with you, that's painkiller?" Hawkeye said with a look of pity.
"Yeah. I'm usually on enough painkiller to put someone under for a few days. Though it is barely enough." Danny admitted.
"YOU POOR YOUNG BOYS!" They all jumped as Armstrong seemed to be going through some kind of melt down. "TO GO THROUGH SO MUCH! LITERALLY SACRIFICING LIFE AND LIMB FOR YOUR FAMILIES! COME, LET ME COMFORT YOU IN MY EMBRACE!" Danny's brain went into shock as the light of alchemy started to grow stronger around the man, turning into sparkles within the air as he flexed his muscles to the point were his shirt exploded, exposing what must have been a ten pack.
Before Ed or Danny could runaway, they found themselves both lifted out of their seats and pressed into the man's pecks. "What the hell!? Let go!"
"Don't worry Fullmetal, that's just how Alex is. He won't hurt you." Mustang said, sounding like he was getting a kick out of this. "Though I have to wonder what you were doing down at the alley with Lieutenant Hawkeye? Weren't you supposed to be performing your experimental procedure on the girl today?"
Ed's brain seemed to latch onto that as a life line. "That's right, Nina! How did it all go!? Did you manage to get her back to normal!?"
Alex stopped and dropped the two to the ground. "What's this about a Nina?"
Danny was quiet. "Sorry... I did all I could."
Ed had frozen and Mustang looked down with sad eyes. Hughes and Armstrong just looked around confused, though they felt the tension in the room. "You mean... she's dead?" Al said what was on all their minds.
"What? No!" Danny said confused as to why they would jump to that conclusion. "I said I did all I could. I didn't say she was dead. Her mind was separated from the dog's and her body seems to be stable. We will need a bit more time to make sure that she doesn't have some kind of relapse, but she seems healthy."
"Then why didn't you just say you fixed her!" Ed shouted angrily.
"Because you asked if she was back to 'normal'." Danny said backing away.
"What is that supposed to mean!? Is she better or not!?" Ed shouted again.
"Perhaps it would be better if you all just saw it yourselves." Riza said flatly. "It is... quite adorable really."
They all stood around the little sleeping girl's bed, staring down at her face.
During the process, a few of Nina's own recessive traits that she had in common with Lieutenant Hawkeye had been brought up to the surface by the method that was chosen to decrypt her DNA. So her old brown hair was now a golden blond, and with it out of her usual braids, she looked like a little Hawkeye who let her hair down.
That is, if it wasn't for one detail.
"WHY DOES SHE HAVE DOG EARS!?"
If you claim to have seen that coming, I will call you a liar. But that's how it is going to be. Nina is now a little girl with dog ears.
Stab Danny for all he cares, he's on too much painkiller to feel it.